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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26295418">The Time Traveler's Kismesis</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnarkySoleil/pseuds/SnarkySoleil'>SnarkySoleil</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Homestuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood and Gore, Bulges and Nooks (Homestuck), Dream Bubbles (Homestuck), Dual Bulges (Homestuck), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, General Helmsman Body Horror, I hate sand, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Inappropriate Dildo Components, It's Bones, Outdoor Sex, Quadrant Vacillation, Smoking, That's what the dream bubbles are for baybeeeeee, The death doesn't stick either if you're worried, Time Travel, What do you expect from a Megido?, dont think there's active bone fucking here don't worry about it, no bones were harmed in the making of this fic except for Psiioniic's, okay as a follow up the dildo is only referenced to, there's going to be sand in all those crevices yall please make better decicions</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 08:42:20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,839</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26295418</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnarkySoleil/pseuds/SnarkySoleil</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Handmaid and the Helmsman are traveling on opposite parallel tracks in time, but sometimes (as time is wont to do) the tracks shift and merge. Two ancient beings find solace in each other, and finally heal at the end of the world as they both know it.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>The Handmaid/The Psiioniic | The Helmsman</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Sloppy Seconds 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Time Traveler's Kismesis</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rick_o_matic/gifts">Rick_o_matic</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>You're screaming the first time she visits you, which really sets the tone for subsequent appearances. It's difficult not to scream out of rage and pain, grief no one listens to echoing around the helmsblock. She listens for a few minutes before she clears her throat, announcing her presence.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"You done?" Her accent is ancient, implacable, and she spins something on a necklace chain around her fingers. "Give me the date, battery. I want to know where I ended up."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You cough, blood dripping from your left nostril as you stare at her. You bare your teeth. "Name, rank, and hex code first," you say, hissing. She's not wearing a uniform, instead wrapped in a long black and green dress that makes you go crosseyed to focus on it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Nah." She pushes herself off the wall she's leaning against. "A1A100, passcode R3D3MP710N. Gods above, battery, could you choose something a little more tragic?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You glare at her, but your systems stop pinging alarms at the intruder with your access codes. "Yes," you say, finally. "First thing that came to my head. Who are you?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She approaches the helmscolumn, still swinging her bauble on its chain. You swallow hard as you recognize it-- The symbol of the Sufferer, heretical cuffs looped over each other. "A friend." She snorts. "Or something like that. Gimme the date before I kill you."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Not if I kill you first," you say, and her lip trembles in an odd enough way you're too confused to avoid the question any longer. You give her the date and she nods, still playing with the Sufferer's symbol.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Good. So I'm just in time." She floats up in a soft cascade of psionics, up to your eye level. Hair slips from her severe bun and sways in front of her high cheekbones as she considers you. "You have no idea how many of your broken carcasses I had to talk to to get here. Time is fraught with paths and tributaries, so many alternate paths that we are but helpless to tumble along their paths. I don't expect you to begin understanding what I am, battery, not so soon."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"You're the Demoness. The Handmaid," you add, as she gapes at you. You raise your eyebrow, a bit of blood trickling at the disruption and forcing your eye closed. "What? I'm the Helmsman, the Imperial Network, the battery to the Battleship Condescension itself. You think I don't have a few fairy tales for wigglers in my databank? There's some paintings, too."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Handmaid shakes herself out of her stupor. "Any nudies?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"At least twelve," you say. "They all seem to have bigger spheres than you do in the flesh."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She slaps you across the face, claws leaving pinpricks in your cheek. "I didn't miss that mouth," she says. "There’s nothing wrong with my paintings and I like to think that I have big sphere energy even if it did matter. So, did all the screaming I walk into cancel out the potential crisis at seeing a daymare become manifest in front of you? I was so looking forward to it."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Sort of." A biowire snakes down from the ceiling, clumsily wiping the blood from your eye. You keep your eye screwed shut as it attempts to sink into the soft crevice of your eye socket, blowing at it until it takes the hint and retreats. "What's the worst you could do, kill me?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She laughs then. "You're right. Might as well come here to do what I planned." She unhooks the chain in her hand, slinging it around your neck and fastening it blind behind you. She smooths a hand over the symbol before lifting your tight collar, slipping it inside your flight suit and out of sight. The symbol almost burns with its coolness, flush against your skin. "You need this more than I do."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You blink, not sure if blood or tears cloud your vision now. The Handmaid touches down, heels splashing in the shallow water around the helmscolumn. "Where did you get this?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Is it important?" The Handmaid cocks her head to the side. The air starts to warp around her as she speaks, the light bending. "Now if you excuse me, I have an appointment."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She's gone before you can so much as inhale. You wait for her to reappear but she does not, and you hang in gloomy silence. You don't scream anymore however, the necklace you now wear keeping you grounded in reality without the situation becoming overwhelming. Somewhere out there, He is remembered.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She reappears somewhere around your third lifetime. Her horns still curve around each other in impossible, ancient spirals, but she lacks the chip on the right one you saw when last you met. "Date, battery?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Your head hangs in empty space, and you stare at the ground. Your whole body cringes away at itself, at the idea of returning to your body instead of sheltering in the refuge of the ship's systems. She must have stated your helming codes to bring you back into yourself. You drone out the date, gravity pulling your hair around your head in greasy curtains.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"The fuck's wrong with you?" The Handmaid circles you, jabbing at your side with an index finger. You hiss at her. "Come on, spark up."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Leave me alone."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"No." Her voice is singsong, and she trails her nails along your flightsuit and skids them across wires. "Not until you snap out of whatever funk you're in. Is this how you treat guests? Mope at them until they leave because the awkwardness is going all solid? Grow a spine."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"If my arms still worked I'd rip it out and shove it so far down your throat it came out of your nook." You bare your teeth for emphasis, but she only cackles.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Wouldn't be the first time I had bones up my nook.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"What?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Rustie girls make do," the Handmaid replies. She grins, and you let out a soft noise of disgust from the back of your throat. She taps your cheek. “Focus up, Helmsman. You’re slipping again.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I am not slipping,” you say, for all you want to retreat from your body. You manage a faint smirk that twitches at your lip. “I’m trying to work out the logistics of spine fucking.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t be crude.” The Handmaid pulls a cigarette from her bust, horns sparking with psionic energy and lighting it. She takes a pull. “It was a tibia, if it matters, carved myself.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s morbid, and coming from me that’s a pretty harsh sentence.” You groan as you receive a request from the bridge, and you kick the engines into higher gear to force the ship along faster through space. You could care less about why.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Does it help if I say it didn’t come from a troll?” The Handmaid blows smoke at a biowire creeping down your face, causing it to recoil and stab back into your temple port.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not particularly. What were we talking about, again?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Handmaid leans a hand on her hip. “I believe I had just finished calling you out for being a layabout, and then you graphically described I believe, murdering me? It is difficult to tell.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I could always try,” you say. “If it gets you to shut up and leave me alone.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not if I kill you first, battery, and we both know how that would go.” The Handmaid smiles, twisted with her usual vindictiveness and yet almost sad. She stubs out her cigarette on her own wrist, and you grimace at the faint smell of burnt flesh. She flicks out the stub onto the floor of the helmsblock. “I have to get going.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“To an appointment?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She looks surprised that you know this, but inclines her head all the same. “Correct.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What’s this appointment about, anyways?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She sighs, almost wistful. “The end of the fucking world, Helmsman.” Then she’s gone, stepping back into a pocket of spacetime.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>An hour later you reluctantly thank her in retrospect, as the chase you engaged in during your conversation with the Handmaid evolves. The indigo at the bridge is too slow to realize the Tulurians pursuing you have cornered the ship into inhabited space, and you manage to switch gears and redirect in time to avoid getting caught in the orbital pull of a planet on the cusp of civilization. The ship would have survived if it had continued on its earlier path, and you wouldn’t have been alerted by your various programs apart from a notification to raise shields if you’d been lost in your own mind instead of present in the world.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The Handmaid visits more and more frequently, popping in and out of your life at her leisure. You start measuring the fluctuations in the helmsblock, predicting about when she jumps back in with only a few days’ window of error. You manage the exact second, once, giving her the date and time before she even asks. She yells at you, and vows to become more unpredictable so she can ‘see that skeleton of yours jump a mile into space and get some semblance of entertainment.’ She may stay true to her word to herself, as her age and awareness of your conversations with each other fluctuates with each visit, but you continue moving doggedly forward in time and your instruments never fail you. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>She visits you once on a holiday, the only time she ever does. You predicted her visit of course but it slipped your mind, as so many things do when forced to accept reality and sit in your meat suit for extended periods of time. She’s smoking, again, and you turn on your fire suppression system. She sputters, shaking out her hands and pinging psionics against your cheek until the misted water stops falling around both your heads. “You’re insufferable. What’s the date?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You flinch at the question and she tilts her head as you give it to her. She’s told you a few times now she wasn’t raised on Alternia, a curious idea but not completely alien with how trollkind reaches to the stars. Plus, being a time-traveling immortal creature with allegiances to an eldritch master no doubt has something to do with it. She doesn’t know holidays, or the way the tides shift when a moon begins to wane while the other waxes, or the way the sands across the desert fly higher in the winter and spread daywalker spores amongst neighboring settlements that crowd up against the dunes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s a holiday,” you say when she continues staring at you. “Contribution day.” She continues staring blankly until the helmsblock fans kick up into their hourly cycle, wafting pailing pheromones towards her that the fire suppression system didn’t have time to wash away. She looks you over, stepping back to do so, taking in your bruised lips and the way your chest heaves for breath.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“With the Empress?” You nod. “How long ago?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“She just left,” you say, and while your voice stays steady you can’t help the way you sag in on yourself, gravity threatening to pull you down only for the wires of your helming wires to keep you suspended. She advances in the time that you take to blink, lifting up again the few feet necessary to get to eye level with her psionics as she cups your face. “I’m fine,” you add.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Bullshit, Helmsman.” You’ve never heard her voice so soft as she smooths a thumb along your hollow jawline, and you lean into the touch as though you’re starving. “You’re a terrible liar. Plus, I haven’t heard any of the pining I get from you every time you talk about </span>
  <em>
    <span>Him. </span>
  </em>
  <span>You couldn’t hide a quadrant if you tried.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Does it matter?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It does to me.” She doesn’t pap you, not quite, but her touch stays soft. You turn your head further and catch sight of the underside of her arm. It’s pockmarked with cigarette burns which you expect, as well as deep furrows that travel vertically up her arm and cross over the faint veins. They repeat themselves, over and over, and she catches you looking. “What? Jealous I tried to kill myself before you could get the chance?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“A little,” you say, and you start to relax as she raises her hand up to comb through your hair. “Who’s supposed to kill me if you’re not around?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She laughs, but there’s a wetness that makes your eyes snap back into focus. She’s looking at you with a kind of ache in her eyes that makes your stomach roll. “I wish it was that easy,” she says. She moves her hand back down to your face, fingers brushing along the underside of the goggles sunk into your skin. “I wish I was the one to kill you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Do you know what does?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I do.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you going to tell me?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’s quiet, hand dropping from your face to rest somewhere on your chest. It hovers over the hidden necklace beneath, a constant chill that keeps you company even after all this time. “Noise,” she says, finally. “Terrible noise. It creeps into your pan slowly and then all at once, and you were screaming so much I could hardly understand anything you said.” She takes a breath, and gives you a smile that comes closer to reaching her eyes than any of the smiles that came before. “You’ll know when the time comes. You’ll know when to pump the brakes, battery, you always do.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’s gone, as quickly as she came. Your turn on the sprinklers above your head and wash away the remnants of the cursed holiday, but your cheek is still warm where she touched you.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The day comes sooner than you expect. After a certain point the Handmaid’s appearances drop off, until they cease completely. You sink into yourself in their absence, diving into the machine and making a hive there. You start noticing alerts pinging at you, every perigee at first and then weekly. Something is putting stress on your pan, distant and cloying and clawing for an audience. You’re the lowest blood by far aboard the ship and so you say nothing, and by the time the Empress realizes the Vast Glub is coming it’s here. She doesn’t even notice as you slow your speed to hasten its approach, pumping the brakes as you were instructed so long ago.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Handmaid appears while you’re in your death throes, screaming as when first you met her as blood hemorrhages from every one of your orifices. You barely notice her, small as she is, cringing against the wall of the helmsblock as if trying to sink into the metal. You let out another agonized wail as you fling your head down, eyes wide as the Empress screams at you over the intercom to </span>
  <em>
    <span>go faster, go harder, run, Helmsman! We have to run, you sorry bastard! </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>The haunting song in your pan abates a few seconds, long enough for you to absorb the Handmaid before you. She’s young, so much younger than you’ve ever seen her. She can’t be older than six, eyes still gray and lacking the filled-in color a harbinger of her matured psionics in her later sweeps. She’s wearing a conservative skirt and her hair falls from its bun, a clumsy hairstyle she no doubt did herself. You smile with teeth stained with blood, and then cry out again and retch more blood onto the ground.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Repeat after me,” you say. “A1A100, passcode R3D3MP710N.” When she stays quiet you bare your teeth, snarling. “Repeat it!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She stammers a few times before managing to speak. “A1A100, passcode R3D3MP710N. What does that mean? Who are you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’ll know when you’re older.” Your back arches outside your control and you scream, blasting your goggles right off your face in a wild spray of psionic power you forgot you had. “Remember that!” Your psionics are burning holes into you, burning holes in your skin and your clothes as you melt yourself down from the inside out. The Sufferer’s symbol hangs in empty space, and she fixates on it. “Take it.” Your voice is a hollow rasp. “Take it!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She stumbles forward, grabbing at the necklace and breaking it off your neck. “What do I do with it?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Keep it, I don’t care. It’ll come to you what you're supposed to do with it.” You spasm, and you taste viscera on your tongue as your vision starts tunneling. “Now get out of here. You’re not--” You choke on your own blood and can’t speak anymore, and any attempts result in you almost swallowing your tongue. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Please, I don’t understand. What’s happening?” She grips the necklace tight in her hands, eyes wide.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You find your voice as the pain reaches a peak and then plateaus, and your nerves cancel out and leave a buzzing behind your eyes. Your vision begins to go dark. You feel nothing, nothing at all, your sense of self floating. “The end of the fucking world, Handmaid,” you say. “Get going, before I kill you,” you add, for old time’s sake.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You see some fire behind her eyes. “Not if I kill you first!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You laugh, and you don’t stop laughing, and you die with a smile on your face as time bends around her for the last time.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>You wake up to the sound of crashing waves, and the smell of the sea. You’re flat on your back, and as you twitch and find yourself you realize that your limbs are whole. Mostly, at least. You can feel sand digging into your skin into gaping wounds, and as you sit up and open your eyes your legs look misshapen and twisted. You look to the side and see her, the Handmaid, old again as she stares out to sea. When she hears you stirring and meets your eyes, her own are glazed over and white.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“About time,” she says. “I thought I’d never find the right bubble.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You act like I know what that is.” You grimace and massage your leg, which begins knitting itself back into something resembling a proper limb as you watch it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Does it matter?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not really.” You look up to the sky, full of reassuring constellations and with two moons hovering overhead just where they’re supposed to be. “Am I dead? Are you dead?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes!” The Handmaid grins then, the most genuine expression she’s ever offered you. She hisses as you punch her in the shoulder with a mending arm.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Bitch. You were supposed to let me kill you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“With what?” the Handmaid slaps at your hand as you try to grab a horn, leaning back away from you. “Plus, you were too busy being selfish with your own private concert to let me kill you back then.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“With your half-formed psionics? Please. What were you, six?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Seven, actually,” she says. “It was my first attempt at jumping without a guide, and it led me to you. My… Guardian, he made me curious. About your friends, about you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Lucky me.” You rub at your arm as the skin seals itself over bone and you pull a face. “Gods, that’s disgusting.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You should have smelled that helmsblock as an outsider. You looked like a corpse and fucking reeked to match.” The Handmaid’s nose wrinkles. “You were in optimal showering position, and yet you never even bothered.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“They hosed me down with antiseptic soap sometimes,” you say. “Does that count?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Absolutely not.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The waves crash along the shore, and you look off to the side and spot glimmering lights of a port town bustling and bursting with song. Something pings at the back of your pan, a memory that this is shaped after, but you can’t quite grasp it. Your death dominates all memory right now. “How do you die? Did, I mean.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The Empress,” the Handmaid says. She snorts as you let out a groan. “I know. Anticlimactic, letting her get the last laugh in on me with a shitty wiggler duel. But I was tired, Helmsman. It seemed the right time and… I wanted to see if she could.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Congratulations, you win the prize of finally getting to take a nap.” You pause. “Does this count as a nap? I’m not sure about how this whole afterlife thing works.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ll take what I can get, honestly,” the Handmaid says. “After running around the universe unceasingly, chasing a goal I never understood, this seems as good a rest as any. Plus, I get to see you finally on the same page as me.” She turns to face you properly, scowling. “Do you know how frustrating it is, trying to knock sense into your sorry ass on a whacked up timeline?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You laugh, putting a hand behind you on the sand. “Your fault for being all screwy with the timeline in the first place. Did you actually know what you were doing, or were you just winging it?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I knew-- Only a little bit!” She bares her teeth at you and you laugh harder, and you’re still laughing as she tackles you to the ground. You only stop when her lips seal against yours, and you don’t argue the kiss that follows.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Somewhere along the way the kiss grows more desperate as she shoves you into the ground, and you roll on top of her when you notice her attention slipping. She snarls, muscles bunching but you settle your weight, and you keep kissing her even as her psionics flare up against yours. You shove back with your own, sparks flying around both your heads and sending spirals of sand flying into the air on the psionic breeze. She bites your lip, hard, and releases you just in time to headbutt you with all her strength.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You fall back, groaning and holding your head, only for the Handmaid to straddle you once again and kiss deep into your neck. You tilt your head to allow her room, letting out a ragged groan as she bites down harder than she did your lip. “Bastard,” she whispers into your ear, nibbling along your jaw. “I missed you so much, you terrible fucking bastard.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You sit up, psionics at your disposal as you fling her back into the sand. You pounce before she recovers, sliding your chest flush against hers again. Her hair is coming undone, falling around her face and she glares at you as you kiss her again. “You’re going soft,” you say, tugging at her hair. She lets out a squeak, and then snarls as you snicker. “Missed you too. You stopped visiting me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I got scared,” she says, and she sighs as you slide a hand down into her dress and cup one of her breasts in a healing hand. She lifts a hand to your face, and you catch sight of her scarred wrist. You lean in, kissing the scars there, and they fade under your touch like ripples in a pond. “I’d seen you die once. I didn’t need to see it again.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So you let me traumatize your wiggler self. I see. Very wise, Handmaid.” You kiss her again, catching her bottom lip in your teeth and sucking before letting go. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And you think me showing up as a wizened hag would do past me any good? I didn’t want to risk it with how unstable your timeline was.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You shrug, and get up off her so she can take off her dress. She kicks her heels off into the sand and they tumble down the hillside you’re on. She ignores the loss of her shoes and spreads the dress out on the ground, and watches with raised eyebrows as you struggle with your psionic-scored flight suit. “You’re so pathetic, Helmsman. Come on now.” She reaches out to each of your shoulders, tearing the fragile fabric in two and helping to peel it off you.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Was that really necessary?” You toss the destroyed garment on the ground with her dress, providing some refuge from the sand.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She shoves you backwards onto the discarded articles of clothing, flicking at your now-exposed sheath. “Not really. But it’s a memory, isn’t it? We can get new clothes. Now stop talking.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She straddles you again, and slaps you hard across the face when you try to sit up. She starts grinding up against you, inhaling slowly, and you try not to stare as her ruby bulge unsheathes and smears against your stomach. She’s positioned herself perfectly over your own sheath, and she lets out a triumphant growl as you start unsheathing into her with no room for error. She shifts to the left to allow one of your bulges free reign before reseating herself, its twin sliding up along the outer folds of her nook before starting to push its way inside.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You tip your head back as you fill her, putting a hand to her hip and following her motions as she continues to rock forwards and back in a lazy rhythm. She maintains her calm for all of two seconds before your bulges twine around each other and then stretch, and she lets out a gasping cry as she falls forward against you. You catch her against your chest again, both hands on her hips now and guiding you both through the motions you’d almost forgotten. Her nose brushes against yours and her lashes flutter against your cheek, a heart wrenching intimacy that has your chest burning in sympathy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You bite her to knock sense back into her, teeth sinking into her neck. She jolts, eyes flying open, and as you growl she remembers herself. She grabs at one of your twinned horns and digs her nails into the hornbeds, and you hiss before letting her go. She starts riding you with more intent, hips snapping forward and back in a near-blistering pace as you both strive to forget the life that came before and brought you here.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You don’t know who starts crying first. Your eyes burn as you fuck her, bulges aching from disuse and her demands. Hot tears land on your cheek and you roll her again before she can realize and get embarrassed, burying your face in her neck. She wails despite your efforts to preserve her dignity, wrapping her legs around your waist and bringing you closer. You kiss her, she bites you, you sink your nails into the soft flesh of her breast and she rakes her nails up your back which echo with the fading scars of the helm. Tears still streak down your face as you kiss her again, and she shoves at your tongue with her own and slides it into your mouth.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There’s no pail out here, and even if you could summon one with your memory you don’t care. The Handmaid still has you pulled tight against her and you doubt she’d give you the leeway to so much as take your arm away to stretch at this point. You don’t want to get off her. You don’t want to leave. Your bulges stiffen inside her nook and you stay pressed to her, lowering a hand to her bulge and stroking it in time with both of your erratic thrustings.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She clenches down on you and writhes in the sand, your clothing forgotten a few feet to the left after all the rolling you both did. Her bulge squirms out of your grip and releases slurry onto your stomachs, and the sound of her yelling to the stars hurls you over the cliffside of your own climax. You bow your head, pressing your forehead to hers as you thrust one more time, filling her as she gasps for air. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>You both stay like that for a few moments, panting, before her legs fall from around your waist and plop back onto the sand. Her hair spreads around her head in an inky pool, shifting as she murmurs when you pull away. Your bulges drip with your combined genetic material, and some leaks from her swollen nook onto the sand. You roll onto your side and she follows you, opening her eyes and throwing an arm over your torso.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Now that you’ve found me, are you going to leave?” You trace your fingers along the curve of her hip.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, I don’t think so,” she says. “You’re too much of a slimy bastard to let roam free amongst these bubbles. Who’s going to kill you if I’m gone?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>You snort, flicking at her horn. She smacks your hand right back, and just like you now her injuries and scars have faded completely. “No one. Not anymore.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“A crying shame,” the Handmaid says, and rolls onto her back. You stretch your spine with an audible creaking of joints and settle with your head on her chest. She plays with your hair, and you both watch the waves crash against the shore. The sun never rises and so there you stay, two harbingers of the apocalypse finally falling still in the forever twilight.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>yo i've never read or seen the time traveler's wife but the summary? shit's whack. anyways i stole the title shamelessly and give you a totally unrelated fic. hope you enjoyed!</p><p>where'd the necklace come from in the first place? fuck if I know! i tried to figure out the logistics of where in time it came from and I gave myself a headache. don't @ me</p></blockquote></div></div>
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